The DVD Report #94

This coming Sunday brings with it the presentation of the 81st Annual Academy Awards. Though none of this year’s Best Picture nominees is yet available on DVD, films with other major nominations have been released.

Joining the previously reviewed WALL-E, The Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Visitor are two films featuring performances by Best Actress nominees Melissa Leo and Angelina Jolie.

Melissa Leo, a journeyman actor best known for her TV work, particularly as a detective in the long-running series Homicide: Life on the Streets, comes through with her first starring role in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River. As a woman who barely gets by raising two sons as a part-time clerk in a convenience store, Leo puts a face on life-long poverty that’s hard to shake even after the film ends. Forced through circumstance to aid in the smuggling of Chinese and Pakistani immigrants from Canada into the U.S. across the frozen St. Lawrence River that runs across the Mohawk Reservation between upstate New York and Canada, Leo’s Ray is a proud woman who would rather take a bullet than lose money in her nefarious enterprise. Yet, when it counts, she comes through both as a mother and a friend in a film that is marked by a constant sadness.

Also worthy of note are Misty Upham as a soft-spoken, yet equally fiercely determined Mohawk woman and Charlie McDermott as Leo’s conflicted teenage son. Writer/director Hunt’s compelling screenplay is also nominated for an Oscar.

Angelina Jolie, one of the most famous mothers on the planet, eschews the tough gal roles she usually plays to portray real life 1928 Los Angeles mother Christine Collins whose son disappears while she is at work in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. The case gets nationwide publicity and a young boy comes forward claiming to be Jolie’s missing son. The Los Angeles police department, which is anxious to close their books on the case, unites the boy with Jolie who insists he is not her son. Jolie’s continued protests result in her being incarcerated in a mental institution to keep her quiet. More complications ensue and eventually the corrupt police department is brought to its knees.

In addition to Jolie, there are good performances by Jeffrey Donovan as an egotistical police captain, Michael Kelly as an intrepid investigator and all the child actors. Then there’s an actress in a tiny role as a mental hospital inmate who befriends Jolie who I thought acted her off the screen. When she undergoes shock therapy you really feel for the character. I had no idea who the actress was until I read the end credits and realized it was Amy Ryan who played the mother of a missing child to her own Oscar nomination in last year’s Gone Baby Gone.

I liked Jolie, especially in the early scenes in the film, but never once did I forget that I was watching a famous actress playing a role. Everything about the production is first-rate including the scenes of Jolie at work in the phone company. Eastwood’s direction couldn’t be better. The editing, cinematography, art direction, set design, costumes, makeup and Eastwood’s melancholy score all provide excellent support to the grim story which is told with the utmost taste and restraint.

Ridley Scott is a director whose films often seem to offer more promise than they actually deliver. His latest, Body of Lies, is no exception. Leonardo DiCaprio, always an interesting actor, tries his damndest to make believable his character, a CIA operative in the Middle East, but the screenplay by The Departed’s William Monahan is so convoluted that neither DiCaprio’s character nor his story ever really makes much sense. Faring even worse is Russell Crowe as DiCaprio’s fat slob of a handler back in Langley, Virginia. Their few scenes together fail to ignite any sparks and Crowe’s scenes with his young family are nothing special. Mark Strong as the head of the Lebanese Secret Police provides the film with what little class it has. Production values are excellent, but how many explosions and needless deaths does it take before enough is enough?

Alternately sweet and raunchy, Kevin Smith’s latest comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about a couple of long time platonic friends and roommates who decide to make an adult film to pay the rent, resulting in the inevitable. The laughs come fast and furious when spouted by the likes of Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Jason Mewes, Craig Robinson, Jeff Anderson and Traci Lords, with Justin Long and Brandon Routh in minor roles. It was filmed in and around Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville.

Warner Bros. has released several films in what it is calling the Paul Newman Film Series. The films are not part of a set but are being released separately.

Newman made his directorial debut with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel in which he directed wife Joanne Woodward to an Oscar nomination and both of them to New York Film Critics and Golden Globes awards. Woodward, in arguably her best screen performance, plays a repressed small-town schoolteacher who lives with her domineering widowed mother. The film, which has taken twelve years to be released on DVD, was in bad need of restoration which it’s quietly gotten for this release. Almost as good as Woodward are Estelle Parson, also Oscar nominated, as her friend, a fellow schoolteacher; Kate Harrington as her selfish mother; and James Olson as the man with whom she has a brief affair.

Newman was so embarrassed by his first film, 1954’s The Silver Chalice, that he took out an ad in Variety apologizing to anyone who may have seen it. The film, directed by Victor Saville, was one of a number of biblical epics made to cash in on the success of Quo Vadis and The Robe. Newman’s performance is bad, but worth seeing for an even better appreciation of the great actor he became in a very short time thereafter. Virginia Mayo is a seductress, Jack Palance a sorcerer with a messiah complex and Pier Angeli the good girl he marries. Newman and Angeli fared much better two years later in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Despite its shortcomings, the film was nominated for Oscars for its cinematography and Franz Waxman’s score.

Newman played second banana to Ann Blyth in 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story, which would prove to be Blyth’s last film. The film, which chronicles only a portion of the famed torch singer’s life, was a box office disappointment that had the misfortune to follow by several months a superior TV version with Polly Bergen. Unlike Bergen, Blyth’s soprano voice was deemed too high for her impersonation of the Show Boat star and she was dubbed by Gogi Grant. Newman plays one of her gangster lovers.

Translating Japanese samurai films into Hollywood westernswas nothing new when Martin Ritt who remade Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as 1964’s The Outrage with Newman who had had one of his greatest roles in Ritt’s Hud the year before. Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai had successfully been re-made as The Magnificent Seven several years earlier. The tale of a rape and murder, as in the original, is told by four different people, some or all of whom may be lying. Newman is the Mexican bandit accused of the crimes, Laurence Harvey the dead man and Claire Bloom his wife, while Edward G. Robinson, William Shatner, Howard Da Silva and Paul Fix provide important supporting roles. James Wong Howe’s stunning black-and-white cinematography is a stand-out.

This week’s bargain Blu-ray release is a double bill of Bennett Miller’s 2005 film Capote and Richard Brooks’ 1967 film In Cold Blood, the film version of the book whose detailed background is the subject of Capote. The former was nominated for five Oscars and won one for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of author Truman Capote. The latter was nominated for four Oscars, but won none, yet it is the more compelling work thanks in major part to the chilling performances of Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the cold blooded killers of a Kansas family of four. If you’ve never read Capote’s book or seen the earlier film it would be a good idea to see it before viewing or re-viewing Capote.

Also making their Blu-ray debuts are the Oscar winning films Gandhi and Kramer vs. Kramer, the cult hit Donnie Darko and the controversial The Passion of the Christ.

Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won eight of the eleven 1982 Oscars it was nominated for including Best Picture, Actor (Ben Kingsley) and Director. Production values are first rate and Kingsley is magnificent as the Indian lawyer who led the Indian revolts against the British through his philosophy of non-violence. At 3 hours and 11 minutes long, however, the film goes on a bit longer than it should and the parade of famous actors in minor roles becomes a bit disconcerting, but it is an experience well worth having. Blu-ray extras include a timeline graph of real events in Gandhi’s life and a wry introduction by Attenborough.

Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer won five of the nine 1979 Oscars it was nominated for including Best Picture, Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and Director. Though it plays like a domestic drama made for television, its situation of a father and son abandoned by the wife and mother who leaves to find herself was a new social phenomenon at the time and is played with measured consideration given all sides. Justin Henry as the boy and Jane Alexander as Streep’s friend who becomes Hoffman’s friend were also nominated for their moving performances. There are no Blu-ray extras, but the film does look better than ever.

It isn’t often that a film combines the genres of drama, mystery and science fiction and even less often when such a film does full justice to all three, but Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko does just that. Opening with a plane crash and proceeding to an ending that will make you re-think everything in-between, Kelly’s film gave Jake Gyllenhaal one of his best early roles as a troubled teenager pathologically afraid of loneliness and the thought of spiritual isolation. He is supported by a first-rate cast that includes Patrick Swayze, James Duval, Mary McDonnell, Jena Malone, Seth Rogen, Noah Wyle, Drew Barrymore, Katharine Ross and Jake’s real-life sister Maggie Gyllenhaal as one of his siblings. The disc features both the original theatrical version and the director’s cut with separate commentaries and loads of extras.

For the life of me I can’t figure out the purpose of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. There have been many films over the years about the life of Christ. I’ll take Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings with Jeffrey Hunter, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with Robert Powell, or Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ with Willem Dafoe any day over this bloody, violent exercise in pain porn. The film opens in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus, played by Jim Caviezel, being tempted by Satan incongruously played by a woman. From there he is taken before the Jewish high priests and beaten to a bloody pulp after which he is turned over to the Romans and beaten further before being made to bear the cross upon which he will be nailed. He dies, his body taken down and washed by the women. A large stone rolls away from what is presumably his tomb, he rises naked with no signs of the torture he was put through and walks out of the tomb – the end. Dialogue is in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin.

An antidote to Gibson’s film, and just about anything else, is Murder, She Wrote – The Complete Ninth Season, the latest release of the long-running mystery series starring perennial Emmy nominee Angela Lansbury, covering episodes that ran in the 1992-1993 season. Guest stars that season included Cesar Romero, Brian McNamara, Joseph Bologna, George Hearn, Sally Anne Field, Harvey Fierstein, Patrick Macnee, Steve Forrest, Mariette Hartley, Graham Greene, Len Cariou, John Rubinstein, Richard Beymer, Julie Adams, Dennis Christopher, Robert Beltran, Linda Purl, Stephen Caffrey, Lindsay Crouse, Harry Guardino, Penny Fuller, Sally Kellerman, David Lansbury, Hope Lange, Edward Winter, Neil Patrick Harris, Lee Meriwether, Jane Withers, James Pickens Jr., Carroll Baker, William Katt and, of course, William Windom as Seth.

If you prefer your murders less genteel, there’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – The Eighth Year in which Emmy-nominated Mariska Hargitay, Chris Meloni, Ice-T, Richard Belzer, Dann Florek, Diane Neal and B.D. Wong are joined, in episodes that ran from 2006 to 2007, by guest stars Marcia Gay Harden (an Emmy nominee), Alan Campbell, Connie Nielsen (as Meloni’s new partner), Gregory Harrison, Leslie Caron (an Emmy winner), Jerry Lewis, Michael Kelly, Vincent Spano, Victor Slezak, Elle Fanning, Bob Saget, Brian Dennehy, Blair Underwood, Adam Beach (who would become a regular the following season), Karen Olivo, Dana Ashbrook, Kim Delaney, Tim Daly, Hunter Parrish and Steven Weber.

-Peter J. Patrick (February 17, 2009)